The Sand House and its surroundings A digital animation with backing track

Doncaster's former Sand House was created in a unique way. All its walls were carved from solid rock. Standing as it did within its owner's quarry, which later became a sunken garden, it was easy to forget the Sand House's origins. Photographs taken of the house in the early part of the twentieth century could not easily convey any sense of the layout of the locality.
By the start of the Second World War the Sand House had been destroyed and the former quarry filled back up almost to original ground level. Any appreciation of how the house had once stood in relation to the features around it became infinitely more difficult to achieve. Indeed, the fact that there was ever a habitable house on the site - let alone one of such large proportions - began to be lost. Its adjacent, surviving tunnel network gained much more attention during the rest of the twentieth century, even after the known tunnels had been filled in.
With the help of this video animation, produced by Joe Hare on behalf of The Sand House Charity, we hope that viewers will be able, once again, to appreciate the magnificent Sand House and gain a clear understanding of the how it looked from around the 1870s until the 1920s.
NOTE that the soundtrack to this video was composed and performed by Phil Hall. Phil spent his childhood living at No.71 Victoria Street (which is visible on this animation). He and his family only vacated the house in late-1967, just prior to the house's demolition.

[@ottohoulihan2743]

Did you ever get any conclusive geophys results from around Silverwood Richard?

[@doncastersandhouse]

Thanks for your enquiry. Not so far, but we haven't given up on the possibility. The only feature that we think we may have detected via the GPR survey in that area is the top of the staircase that once linked the Sand House's lower floor level to street level. We need to survey that area again to be certain, when we can exclude all parked vehicles from the area. One problem with detecting any remains of the house's sandstone walls comes from a combination of their potential depth below current ground surface (anything between about 3m and 8m). The other main problem is the fact that the intervening ground comprises a whole variety of mixed fill... just the sort of thing to distortos GPR signals. We hope to carry out further investigations as and when resources become available.

[@ottohoulihan2743]

@@doncastersandhouse Thanks